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Moussaoui Might Be Crazy. And He Might Be Right.

Posted on November 17, 2014
Zacarias Moussaoui.jpg

"Zacarias Moussaoui". Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.



When is it easy to believe a paranoid schizophrenic in the courtroom?

When it is Zacarias Moussaoui and he tells you that a Saudi prince bankrolled the 9/11 attacks.

Moussaoui, who is in a high-security Super-Max prison in Colorado (where he is serving a life sentence), wants to let everybody know what he knows about the brutal attack on American soil more than 13 years ago.

The former French citizen became famous for being the 20th hijacker, the one who got nabbed by the FBI a month before the September attacks.

Here is what the New York Daily News says about Moussaoui’s latest revelations:
The man who became known as the "20th hijacker" from the Sept. 11 attacks wants to testify in lawsuits filed by victims of terrorism.

The imprisoned Zacarias Moussaoui recently wrote to federal courts in New York and Oklahoma, claiming he can offer inside information about the inner workings of al-Qaida to boost legal claims that the government of Saudi Arabia and financial institutions supported terrorism.

Some lawyers have taken him seriously enough to interview him at the Supermax federal prison in Colorado, where he is serving a life sentence.

That there may have been some involvement of high-ranking Saudi government officials in the terrorist attack is not exactly breaking news. In fact, when the 9/11 Commission first drafted up it report, it included 28 pages implicating the Saudis in the attack. Those 28 pages have never seen the light of day.

Here is what the New Yorker said about that:
On the bottom floor of the United States Capitol’s new underground visitors’ center, there is a secure room where the House Intelligence Committee maintains highly classified files. One of those files is titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters.” It is twenty-eight pages long. In 2002, the Administration of George W. Bush excised those pages from the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. President Bush said then that publication of that section of the report would damage American intelligence operations, revealing “sources and methods that would make it harder for us to win the war on terror.”

“There’s nothing in it about national security,” Walter Jones, a Republican congressman from North Carolina who has read the missing pages, contends. “It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me that the document is “stunning in its clarity,” and that it offers direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi individuals and entities in Al Qaeda’s attack on America. “Those twenty-eight pages tell a story that has been completely removed from the 9/11 Report,” Lynch maintains. Another congressman who has read the document said that the evidence of Saudi government support for the 9/11 hijacking is “very disturbing,” and that “the real question is whether it was sanctioned at the royal-family level or beneath that, and whether these leads were followed through.” Now, in a rare example of bipartisanship, Jones and Lynch have co-sponsored a resolution requesting that the Obama Administration declassify the pages.”

Here is how the New York Post reported it last year:
After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.

But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

It was kept secret and remains so today.

President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).

A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.

Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally.

The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.

The findings, if confirmed, would back up open-source reporting showing the hijackers had, at a minimum, ties to several Saudi officials and agents while they were preparing for their attacks inside the United States. In fact, they got help from Saudi VIPs from coast to coast.”

Saudi Arabia is one of our closest allies, and yet we are fundamentally incompatible.

It is an absolute monarchy; we are a representative republic.

We are open. They are closed.

We are pluralistic; they are a hegemony.

Women can’t drive in Saudi Arabia. They can’t go out in public without a man. They can’t vote.

And yet, they buy much of their military hardware from our companies and we get much of our oil from their oil wells.

We are partners in the Middle East in many ways. We both see Iran as a strategic threat. They are relatively moderate on Israel. They helped us when we kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

Saudi Arabia spent 67 billion dollars on its military, the fourth largest expenditure on any country in the world. That number stunned me when I saw it, because it is a land of only 20 million people. It spends more per capita on its armed forces than any other country in the world.

Perhaps this military relationship is the reason we officially don’t probe the Saudis and their involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

But we should probe it and if there was a relationship between the hijackers and the Saudi government, the American people have a right to know about it.

Moussaoui might be crazy, but he also might be right. There is more than enough evidence to believe him.

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